Paper is a major component of every book and tends to be the focus of most environmental discussions in the book publishing industry. There are thousands of Books and magazines publishers in the world. The global impact of this is astonishing. For instance, if a publisher sells a million copies of an average 250-page book, it takes 12,000 trees to produce just this one title.

There are many ways to reduce these environmental impacts from choosing recycled paper for production to reading them on line. According to Wikipedia, an e-book (for electronic book: also eBook) is the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book. Such documents are either read on personal computers, or on dedicated hardware devices known as e-book readers or e-book devices. They have many advantages compared to paper ones. Just to name a few:

Text can be searched automatically, and cross-referenced using hyperlinks.

Less physical space is required to store them. Because they take up little space, e-books can be offered indefinitely, with no 'out of print' date, allowing authors to continue to earn royalties indefinitely (copyright law permitting) and allowing readers to find older works.

Readers who have difficulty reading print books can benefit from the adjustment of text size and font face. Text-to-speech software can be used to automatically convert them to audio books.

It costs little to reproduce an e-book. Copies can be made instantly and in as great a quantity as desired. This makes it easy to retain backups and difficult to eliminate works once they have been distributed.

With Internet access, the ease of distributing e-books is a considerable advantage. They cost little to transfer, and such an operation occurs quickly. Readers can begin reading as soon as the download completes.

Although they require electricity to be read, the production of eBooks

does not consume the paper, ink, and other resources that are used to produce print books.